To help translating CKAN you just need to register for an free account on Transifex, an online translation platform.

Once you have registered and logged in, go to https://www.transifex.com/okfn/ckan and click on the blue “Translate” button on the top right corner:

On the next page, select the language you want to contribute:

And the resource (CKAN 2.7):

You are now set up! Select the “Untranslated” strings in the top menu and use the online editor to add your translations.

We will pull the translations just before the release so if you have some spare time in the next couple of weeks your help is appreciated.

Happy translating!

Flags picture by Penn State on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/pennstatelive/16216912657/

By establishing a data.world profile and linking your data, you give your data consumers additional capabilities on data.world including the ability to:

• Execute SQL and SPARQL queries without needing to create a database
• Join datasets from many different sources and of different file types (file types are automatically normalized in data.world) in open or private workspaces
• Interact with data via R Studio or Python programs using the data.world API as well as use connectors to bring data into visualization tools including Tableau
• Preserve community-generated knowledge around your data using interactive data dictionaries, dataset annotations, file labels, and discussion threads
• Showcase community-created derivative work including transformed data, notebooks, analysis, and visualizations

Watch the Video Walkthrough on LinkDigitalTV

Download ckanext-datadotworld from GitHub

The ckanext-datadotworld code is available free of charge under open source licensing. You can download and try the extension on your own CKAN portal today. Follow the installation instructions, provide your feedback via logging issues or contribute to the extension via your own pull requests.

Community and Commercial Support for installing ckanext-datadotworld is available if needed.

Trial ckanextdatadotworld at Datashades.com

To request a user account and organisational admin access on demo.datashades.com please contact support@linkdigital.com.au and provide the following details.

• Name of Organization
• Contact Name
• Contact Email

Overview of Features in Current Release

The screenshot below shows how you would link your data to a data.world profile from the CKAN admin portal:

Once linked, on the data portal the organisation becomes clearly identified by a data.world label and a link to its data.world profile. For convenience, all the datasets published previously to the synchronization will also be automatically linked to the data.world profile.

Important: At the moment, synchronization is unidirectional. Changes made in CKAN are automatically replicated to data.world, but the reverse is not true. Changes made to CKAN datasets on data.world will stay there and may be overwritten.

This extension was built by Datashades (also trading as Link Digital) in cooperation with the data.world team. For all general inquiries please email info@linkdigital.com.au.

Want to Feature an Extension on CKAN.org?

If you are also working on a CKAN extension and would like to have it featured on CKAN.org, please feel free to contact a member of the Community and Communications Team.

Some of the extensions are aimed at simplifying the work with massive datasets, and the Climate Tagger developed by the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) and the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) is surely one of them.

What is Climate Tagger?

As stated on the Climate Tagger official website, the extension automatically scans, labels, sorts, and catalogues data and document collections. The tool helps climate-related organisations and researchers share their climate development information resources.

Why is it important?

The need for sharing knowledge is getting more and more critical nowadays, particularly with regard to the global concerns such as Climate Change. Making the invaluable knowledge and experience in climate easy to access and share can drastically reduce the risk of natural disasters and help in a common effort to prepare for the coming changes.

Main Features

The Climate Tagger CKAN extension is an absolutely free and simple way to integrate the Climate Tagger into your CKAN based website or Open Data portal. Powered by the Climate Compatible Thesaurus, the extension supports 5 different languages, and due to utilizing Linked Open Data it can easily connect content published on different platforms using different languages.

The Climate Tagger API enables organizations with an automated document tagging and suggestion of related files that help end-users find the resources they are looking for in a much faster way.

We believe that it is only through communication, collaboration and involvement we can make the most of the knowledge that we already have.

 
For downloading the Climate Tagger CKAN extension click here.

Source: www.climatetagger.net

What’s changed?

The menu bar now has a more intuitive navigation with drop-down menus for both mobile and desktop versions. We now have a broader ‘About’ menu for you to get a clear idea of what the CKAN Association does as well as of its structure. With the improvements to the structure of the content, it is now easier to get more from a quick read. The blog with the most up-to-date news and announcements is still available on the site.

We hope you like the changes, and if you have any feedback, please let us know on our social media or through the contact form on the website.

Case Studies

Being open source, the CKAN data management platform is in use by numerous governments, organisations, and communities around the world. Case studies are an excellent means of presenting the results achieved and issues solved with the help of CKAN. We’re looking for contributors to submit case studies based on real experience of using CKAN that could be instructive and of interest to other members of the CKAN community.

To submit your case study please complete the following form.

We are looking forward to receiving your submissions!

A special thanks to Sergey Motornyuk from Link Digital and Konstantin Sivakov from Viderum for their help in preparing these releases!

These patch releases fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using.

Patch release upgrades are very straight-forward and do not contain any backwards incompatible changes or involve any change in the requirements, database or Solr schema.

As stated in the release policy, the latest patch release is the only one officially supported.

For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method:

• Package upgrade
• Source upgrade

If you find any problem, let us know in the mailing list or the IRC channel.

CKAN 2.6

The 2.6.0 release includes improvements on how private datasets are shown on search results, as well as several other minor improvements and over 50 bug fixes. You can check all individual changes on the CHANGELOG. Thank you very much to all the almost 30 community members that have submitted patches since the last release.

If you have customizations or extensions, we suggest you trial the upgrade first in a test environment and refer to the changes in the changelog. Upgrade instructions are below. As there aren’t many major changes since the last version upgrading should be relatively straight-forward.

Note that as previously announced, starting from this version, CKAN requires at least Python 2.7 and Postgres 9.2.

CKAN patch releases

These new patch releases for CKAN 2.3.x, 2.4.x and 2.5.x (2.3.5, 2.4.4 and 2.5.3) fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using.

For a list of the fixes included you can check the CHANGELOG.

Upgrading

For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method: Upgrading CKAN.

If you find any issue, you can let the technical team know in the mailing list or the IRC channel.

The stack presents Link Digital’s best practice, with independently scalable layers, easily adapted to CI workflows and automated system maintenance. It is now freely available to use on our Datashades GitHub repository.

This OpsWorks stack has been in active use by Link Digital and presents a basis on which Link Digital builds and supports its Government Open Data platforms. Hence, the project can justly be called “eating your own dog food”.

Even now that there is a number of improvements in progress, we believe that the newly-published alpha version of the project will add value to the Public Data community.

To build an OpsWorks stack you will need these CloudFormation templates.
When entering parameters for the CloudFormation template you will need the following cookbook URL for the OpsWorks stack.

Steven De Costa at the IODC CKAN Booth

A longer monologue from a dev list discussion:

Attaching our high level architecture using RDS on AWS — for UAT and PROD: appendix_8_updated_aws-hosting-environment-2.

CloudFormation scripts for building out CKAN in a HA config can be found at https://github.com/DataShades/ckan-aws-templates

OpWorks version is here: https://github.com/DataShades/opswx-ckan-cookbook

Happy to collaborate on this and make it shine brighter :)

There are a few other relevant scripts under our datashades set of repos, such as the ASG one here: https://github.com/DataShades/updateasg

And, the general cloud storage one here: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-cloudstorage

And the S3 related one here: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-s3filestore

We’ve also improved the SSO approach with Saml2: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-saml2

And, begun some work for manipulating ACLs, which is important for private dataset resources you’d want to switch to ‘public’ when published: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-acl

Although not formally part of the CKAN roadmap I have a working model of where I’d like CKAN to head when it comes to enterprise file/data storage and access. If you are familiar with the concept of resource views then the idea I’m keen to pursue is similar. It is a concept of resource containers (not para-virtualization containers but storage or access point containers). The idea is to make CKAN extendable via extensions of a type that allow it to do more orchestration around how data is stored and made usable below the discovery layer of the metadata.

The story would be something like:
As a platform operator, I need to be able to configure a variety of storage and access endpoint possibilities, so that custodians can select where data is placed based on type of data or business need.

Resource container extensions would then be built to accommodate things like:

1. Big data, transnational data feeds
2. Semantic lakes
3. Large file storage blobs
4. Self declarative structured data (likely using data packaging/frictionless data)
5. For cost auditing and accountability – storage into specified paid cloud accounts (different AWS, Azure, etc. accounts based on organisation)

I would image that resource view and resource container extensions would be paired in many cases to allow for the view to provide greater access and control of the data to provide an ability to query and extract insights from the data.

The European Data Portal has around 650k datasets. It is true that once a CKAN portal gets to such a size then it can be a chore to do anything over the entire set of data in quick time. However, with the entire catalog readable via API there is a place for other tools to come into the picture to provide meta analysis or broader views over all data in a portal.

CKAN’s structure allows for data ownership and custodianship to remain flexible as the governing entities change over time. If we keen those functions lightweight and build the more intensive data processing tasks within a resource container layer then I think that is the big win :) I see datastore and filestore as examples of resource containers. Datapusher is an example of an ETL that works with datastore but similar tools and concepts can be worked into the model and the open source goodness can grow organically to meet lots of different organisational needs.

Where CKAN differs from other portal software, in my experience, is that it can be used for open Government data, research data, private sector data and ‘data as knowledge’ in virtually any situation. Other portal software appears to be built around capturing a particular market opportunity to generate data as knowledge for a particular customer segment – civic hackers, jurisdictional bureaucrats, open data policy implementations, etc.

CKAN’s harvesting is good, but certainly not perfect. The approach for pushing from CKAN to elsewhere is likely to be used more in our future work, or as we refactor the architecture of current implementations. See: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-syndicate

By using multiple CKAN environments it is pretty easy to have catalogs of ‘working data’ that then push to the ‘published data’ catalog. We use this approach for Government open data when from the bottom up you have agency data collected into CKAN based information asset registers. Sometimes the data doesn’t even exist, but the data management plan can at least first be registered prior to populating the dataset with resources. Once the data is ready it can then be published and syndicated upward to a higher level jurisdictional portal – such as a council, city, state or province. Similarly such datasets can then be syndicated upward again into a national or regional portal – perhaps with further ETL functions put in place to combine the similarly structured data from multiple agencies into a master dataset that presents a larger view of the entire data collection effort.

If the domain of data collection differs, such as in a field of research, then the same architecture can still apply. Multiple research schools of chemistry, for example, could publish working data locally then syndicate upward into a global repository that allows for meta analysis of all research outcomes over the entire domain’s efforts. We’re working on a project in just this manner that is referenced here: http://linkdigital.com.au/news/2016/09/building-mdbox-an-open-access-simulation-data-repository-on-ckan-and-aws

Lastly, published open data is the result of effort which is put into a process of data collection and, usually, some analysis and clean up. The tools used to process data, to prepare, collect or visulise are all part of the value a dataset represents. To bridge data and code we’ve released a very simple resource view for GitHub repositories that can be found here: https://github.com/DataShades/ckanext-githubrepopreview 

Open Government initiatives are formed around principles of transparency, participation and collaboration. There is a desire to enable public-private collaboration over the long term and there is a role for Government to act as impresario to stimulate new markets and economic activity from publishing open data (ref: https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/government_as_impresario.pdf). The reason we built the GitHub resource view is to encourage open source projects to emerge in connection to public datasets, via linking the opportunity for discovery of helpful code with the discovery of helpful datasets.

Sorry for the long monologue! I could have more succinctly just said CKAN rocks, check out all the open source goodness surrounding it and jump in :)

UPDATE: We are happy to announce that registration for the event is now open! You can register today for both in person and online participation!

CKANCon is a day packed with talks and discussions showcasing the incredible work people are doing with CKAN. This includes topics ranging from uses and best CKAN practices to technical services and new extensions. New, long-standing, and future CKAN users are encouraged to attend. Full details, including speakers and breakout sessions, will be announced soon.

If you’re interested in showcasing your CKAN work, please email ckancon@ckan.org! We are looking for speakers to give short talks about upcoming features, extensions, integrations and anything else CKAN.

These patch releases fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using.

Patch release upgrades are very straight-forward and do not contain any backwards incompatible changes or involve any change in the requirements, database or Solr schema.

As stated in the releases policy, the latest patch release is the only one officially supported.

For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method:

• Package upgrade
• Source upgrade

If you find any problem, let us know in the mailing list or the IRC channel.